Apr 29
It is 330am right now and I am completely exhausted so this will have to be short. I will go into more detail tomorrow (or the next day).
I woke up early this morning (read 10am) and went over to Caesar’s Palace to enter Event #6, a $550 no-limit tournament. This was basically a repeat of the event that I skipped this past Wednesday. Anyways, things went very smoothly for most of the day and with 600+ entrants I seized the chip lead early on in level 2 and held onto it for the next ten or eleven hours. I can’t be certain but I believe that it really wasn’t even close. At the dinner break (6.5 hours into the tournament) I had 80,000 chips, chip average was 11k, and the next closest to me was probably about 50k. From a starting stack of 2,000 chips I peaked my count somewhere around 115-120k. Without exaggeration, today I put on a 12-hour clinic on tournament poker.
Anyways, the day went by smoothly up through dinner and into the cash. Once we got to the 800-1600 level things started falling apart for me a bit. With the blinds so high (relative to everyone else, not me) most of the hands simply turned into an All-In party. I took a few beats and my chip stack fell a bit. As the blinds grew higher my cards turned to ice. It is possible that I didn’t win a single hand during the 1500-3000 level, and with antes on every hand I was losing about 7k every eight hands just by folding.
I feel like I played really, really well all day except for two key hands towards the end of the night where I let fatigue and frustration influence my play. I donked off about 30k in chips and after running super cold for the next two hours I found myself on the short stack.
At 2am the tournament called it a day and the twelve of us who remain are set to return tomorrow afternoon (Sunday) and finish it out. I am not quite at the final table (9) but I can just about taste it. Unfortunately I will be the short stack when we resume tomorrow so I am going to have to get in gear and drop the hammer if I want to make a run at the title.
Tournament Stats -
Players left: 12 of 630 (?)
My chip count : 47,000
Average chip count : about 110,000
Blind level : 3000 – 6000 with a 500 ante
Money for 12th place (where I currently sit) : $3500
Money for 1st place (where I will end up) : $83,000
Tomorrow will be a bit rough but at this point I am going to do my best to a) be patient and b) play for first. The two strategies are a bit at odds with each other but with my chip stack I really have nothing to lose by being aggressive. The next payjump isn’t until 9, but after that the money increases are pretty huge. I figure that I will play aggressive early and if I manage to get a hold of some chips I will be in it to win it.
Tournament resumes at 2pm PST.
Good luck to this guy, I’ll tell you how it ends up.
Now I’m going to go pass out.